Esther Dyson on privacy

With so much happening around the world- the financial markets, politics, rugby (Union and League) – it seems terribly mundane to be writing about identity and privacy issues. C’est la vie!

It’s interesting to see that a leading magazine such as Scientific American focus on The Future of Privacy as the theme for its September issue. Another sign of privacy becoming a mainstream issue.

There seems to be a lot of interesting articles but the one that I picked first was How Loss of Privacy May Mean Loss of Security. Besides the title, what drew me was that the author is Esther Dyson. What’s so special about her? Lots of stuff that you can Google but the one fascinating fact is that, for the Personal Genome Project, she and nine other people will post their full genome sequences and accompanying health information online.

She remarked that “I was recently in the market for health insurance. I asked my insurance broker if he would like a copy of my genome, and he politely declined.”

Undoubtedly a person who’s going to have some radical views about privacy…and the article has some gems.

For example, perhaps linked to the above, her view is that “the coming flood of medical and genetic information is likely to change the very nature of health insurance.” She doesn’t see this as requiring a privacy trade-off. Instead, she believes the problem is making cheap and plentiful health insurance available balanced by “mandating subsidies paid by society to provide affordable insurance to those whose high health risks would otherwise make their insurance premiums or treatment prohibitively expensive.”

Hmmm…so how is cheap and plentiful health insurance actually going to be made available in the first place?

She asks the question “What is the best way to limit government power?” The answer seems hard to swallow, “Not so much by rules that protect the privacy of individuals, which the government may decline to observe or enforce, but by rules that limit the privacy of the government and of government officials.”

Another suggestion seems better, “We should be able to monitor what the government does with our personal data and to audit (through representatives) the processes for managing the data and keeping them secure.”

On information privacy in general, while not new, she puts it elegantly, “Much of the privacy that people took for granted in the past was a by-product of friction in finding and assembling information. That friction is mostly gone.”

She goes on to say that, “Rather than attempting to define privacy for all, society should give individuals the tools to control the use and spread of their data.” Disappointingly, the tools she praises are the very limited access controls that Facebook and Flickr provide.

If that’s the best tools we’re going to get, I think we’ve got a long, long way to go before loss of privacy isn’t a mainstream issue any longer!